A long time ago friend of mine pointed out to me that in our own way we cycle from bondage to freedom in our lives.
I had never heard or thought about it before, so I began looking for the pattern to see if it’s true.
I realized that freedom is important to everyone, even though it feels very personal to ourselves.
I noticed that people become slaves to their jobs, their marriages, their responsibilities and their promises, they break free from it all only to find themselves in an entirely new situation with the same rules.
That’s where I was at that time. I was a slave to my life and in survival mode.
It seems to me that bondage can come from any number of things, but typically it’s coming from inside of ourselves.
I’ve learned it’s important to get an outside perspective because we can’t see it when we are in it. Sometimes we can’t even see it when someone else points it out to us.
When we aren’t brave enough to walk through the fear to get to the other side, or we feel obligated to stay in our prison because of promises we made we trap ourselves.
When we live under someone else’s expectations we become slaves to them.
I shutdown and became numb in order to live instead of finding courage that was larger than my fear, I tried to find my freedom by shutting off my heart and caring less about myself.
I did this for a long time until I finally figured out that being shut down is its own type is misery and freedom from caring what happened to me, isn’t really freedom at all.
This is a quote about moral courage from Wikiuniversity. “The moral hero often overcomes shame and humiliation, rejects conformity, risks ostracism, jeopardizes career and status, and sets out alone to take an unpopular stand and do the right thing. Moral courage is choosing to risk embarrassment rather than tolerate injustice.”
I think behind courage is where we find freedom again and again.
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” -Maya Angelou